THE SHOCKING TITLE, stinging us instantly to attention, was read out one afternoon amongst the usual fortnightly choice of essay subjects: A Visit to the Zoo. We were in the highest class of boys and due to leave school in a few months. After a stunned silence these words were greeted with incredulous whistlings, loud and prolonged hoots, sickened groans and a great shuffling and stamping from the back seats where young men with brilliantined hair and narrow shoes were sitting, casually hacking great slivers from the underside of their desks with outsized penknives. Our English master, who was new to the job and unsure of himself, quickly withdrew the subject, explaining that it had got mixed in with a set from some lower form. But the damage was done and it was a long time before the class settled down. A sense of outrage hung menacingly around, ready to ignite explosively with the chalk and dust in the dried-out air at the first hint of further offence. Gradually, however, still muttering savage threats, we sank heavily to the business of writing, after making our reluctant choice between The Advantages and Disadvantages of a Political Career and The Dangers and Benefits of the Space Age – giving only a scornful glance at Whirlpool which had been thrown in as the sop to those who had more imagination than knowledge. Yet throughout the whole hour from its blank beginning to the frenzied bout of last-minute writing, I felt the impact of that subject which had been withdrawn. It was indeed the one topic which for a long time I had been at pains to avoid, but here it was now forcing itself up unexpectedly like something painfully green and fresh amongst all those stony opinions which I was doggedly setting down on paper.
Almost three years before a young woman had come to live with my family for several weeks. I knew nothing about her except that she was a cousin of my mother’s, that she was convalescing from a serious illness and that she expected to be left quite free all day to go out and in as she pleased. Two or three bottles of brilliant-coloured tonics, placed there by my mother, appeared on the bathroom shelf amongst our normal collection of dingy brown ones, throwing stained-glass wedges of light into the bath on sunny days but remaining corked throughout her visit. Nor did she appear to follow up any of the suggestions being offered on all sides as to the best method of ‘taking her out of herself’. For it turned out that the one and only cure she had chosen for herself was to go often and alone to the zoo which was on the other side of the city.
I was on holiday – the only young person in the house and it seemed obvious that, sooner or later, she would ask me to accompany her. At first I was both surprised and thankful that she did not; then I grew angry. Later, however, as I watched her going off day after day by herself, I believed that by not taking it for granted that I would have to be asked she had given me a certain value apart from the family and had somehow included me in the adult world where people could be free and separate from one another if they wished to be, with no reasons given. In this way I gradually, silently came closer to her, and indeed believed that I could share the emotions which kept her all day and in all weathers restlessly on the move.
Then one day while casually drawing on her gloves she flatly enquired with an indifferent glance directed beyond me into the hall mirror: ‘And are you coming out today?’ We walked together to the centre of the city, moving silently and apart, going our separate ways with our own thoughts until we came to the junction of roads where a policeman directed three great streams of traffic. This place where there was hardly a person to be seen but only a steady whirl of glittering cars had for me an unreal and precarious brilliance that afternoon. Even the policeman seemed to take on the authority and abandon of some white-gloved clown who can draw a crazy collection of vehicles after him with a wave of the hand or keep them circling dizzily until he has decided at what corner he will point his finger. I followed with my eyes the direction of that hand down one broad street as far as the eye could see to where it narrowed and a faint green of trees could be seen. They were still the dusty city trees, sparsely planted, and the zoo was still a long way beyond them, but that day, for the first time, I saw this greenness with a painful shock of pleasure.
Now, day after day, we went to the zoo. Sometimes it was wet and we would be almost alone there, and on the stormiest days gusts of rain fell against the metal roofs of the monkey-houses like handfuls of sharp nails and even the enclosed pools were raked into miniature waves on which old crusts, orange peel and dusty feathers rocked desolately together. Sometimes it was so hot that after we had made a tour of the lower houses we climbed no higher but sat for a long time on a bench beside three empty cages which stood on their own in the shade of the only group of trees in that part of the garden. These cages had no labels; there was no way of knowing whether the animals there had died or been moved to some other part or whether the place was being prepared for new arrivals. In the heat we sat and stared at the dusty straw and the empty troughs wondering what the inmates had looked like, and my eyes would climb up and down the wire netting behind the bars as my imagination moved from ostriches and giraffes down to some almost invisible rodent hiding in the straw.
‘I wonder how old you are,’ she said one afternoon as we were sitting in the half-empty tea-house. It was unlike any other restaurant. Half of the roof was glass and on hot days there was an almost tropical atmosphere about the place. All round the walls grew tubs of tall, waxy green plants whose leaves were always damp from the quantities of steam which rose from the tea-urns at one end of the room. The concrete floor was sandy and children would pad silently back and forth carrying flashing glasses of lemonade which they drank holding them above the table, the straws tilted at an angle – thus keeping their chins high enough to see what was going on out of the windows. The smell of elephants penetrated to this place and above the high bushes one could catch an occasional glimpse of the two rows of children rocking by, perched back to back on an ornamental tray which swung like a hammock at every step. Long ago, in another age, I also had swung there. Now I was sitting silently at table opposite a young woman who had been watching me intently for some time while I finished my tea.
‘I’m fifteen,’ I replied, abruptly pushing my plate away from me.
‘Yes, I know that,’ she said, ‘but I’m wondering how old you are in other ways. I mean,’ she went on, leaning her elbows on the table, ‘what do you know about people – about men and women? Do you know, for instance, that they can illumine the most dense, the most boring objects or places or people for one another, and then, by one word or even one look, turn the whole world to iron?’
I looked up quickly. But she was smiling slightly as though to take back a little of the impenetrable hardness, the numbing coldness she had put into that last word, at the same time looking aside again through the hedges, to imply that it was not after all a real question which required an answer but simply a statement of fact which needed only mutual recognition. I had not taken my eyes off her, but now she appeared, in the space of a few seconds, to be quite changed. She was a person who had at last spoken directly to me, who had broken through the restless, drifting indifference of the last few days with something unequivocal as a shout or a fierce gesture of the hands, and I tried to hold her there at the point where this momentary and precarious contact had been made by taking a more careful note of her appearance.
Her hair was straight and dark, with a faint bronzing of lighter colour at the back of her head where it was intricately plaited and twisted up into a heavy coil like a great unripened blackberry. In front it was brushed well back from a smooth, narrow brow which, while absorbed in some thought, she would often touch, tapping her fingers gently between the eyebrows, then drawing them firmly up over her brow and carefully round the temple down to the cheekbone, as though she found deep lines there corresponding with certain ineradicable grievances in her own heart. She had fine dark eyes but most of the time she seemed to look at things with a peculiarly blank and fixed stare as though she would not bother to see objects unless they presented themselves within a very limited field of vision which for her was usually straight ahead. One had the impression that only at this particular spot were human beings clear or even human before disappearing into the amorphous background from which they had emerged. She seldom followed them with her eyes. Occasionally she would drop her head and tuck her chin down into the folds of a broad scarf of blue silk which she wore even on warm days and drew up over her head if it was wet or windy. In this position, and without moving her head, she would stare up and down her person from toes to bosom with the same blank indifference